Free Republic

Millions of citizens long ago concluded that professional sports, academia, and entertainment were no longer disinterested institutions, but far Left and deliberately hostile to Middle America. Yet American conservatives still adamantly supported the nation's traditional investigatory, intelligence, and military agencies - especially when they came under budgetary or cultural attacks. Not so much anymore. For the first time in memory, conservatives now connect the FBI hierarchy with bureaucratic bloat, political bias, and even illegality. In the last five years, the FBI was mostly in the news for the checkered careers of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Robert Mueller, Lisa Page, and...

Defining terms is always a good place to begin a conversation and Victor Davis Hanson’s The Dying Citizen. How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America (Basic Books) weaves a rich definition of citizenship into his discussion of the current threats to this profoundly Western idea. The idea of citizenship originated in the 5th-century B.C. Greek city states, the concept being nourished by the likes of one Alkidamas, who wrote, “Nature has made no man a slave.” This was in profound contrast to the rigid stratification that most all societies then and most non-western societies still...

The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids' schools. In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news - and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light. The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton's email leaks. In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that...

The Death Of Science By Victor Davis Hanson Excerpts: "The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking . . . Is this yet another of the scientific community’s Platonic “noble lies,” as when Fauci assured the public last year that there was no need for masks? He later claimed he had lied so that medical professionals would not run out of needed supplies . . . “Critical race theory” would preposterously tell us that we need racism to fight racism . . . Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we’ll all soon become...

Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border? Afghanistan—the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history? A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out? The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels? Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring? Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences? Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls? Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months. Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of the Biden...

One man’s anarchy is another’s road to justice. Sheer chaos and anarchy on the border?Afghanistan—the most humiliating defeat in recent U.S. military history?A labor-starved supply chain in shambles and holiday shelves emptying out?The worst inflation in 30 years that seems soon ready to match Carter-era levels?Gas hitting $5 a gallon with winter heating fuels soaring?Free-for-all looting in the major cities without consequences?Joe Biden’s policies and Biden himself diving in the polls?Never in recent American history has any administration birthed such disasters in its first nine months. Yet most Americans are arguing not over the sheer chaos and disasters of the...

The Left Got What It Wanted—So Now What? There is no schadenfreude in seeing the Left destroy everything it touches—because its claws tear all of us as well. What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?ThenNo sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.Foreign Policy published an article by a liberal...

TUCKER CARLSON: Why did you leave National Review? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Because there were certain issues that would pop up occasionally, and I could predict what the answer was going to be. The Covington kids. I just sensed that before we knew anything, people would come and condemn them. TUCKER CARLSON: People at NR condemned the Covington kids? VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: I think there were certain people in the Republican movement, or establishment, who felt it is their duty to internally police their own, and that's kind of a virtue signal to the left. We are just part of your...

Epigraph: "Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." George Orwell, "Animal Farm" What were we to make of multimillionaire Barack Obama's 60th birthday bash at his Martha's Vineyard estate, and the throng of the woke wealthy and their masked helot attendants? Was socialist Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) suffering for the people when she wore a...

The world outside or before the U.S. was and is not a pretty thing. Even in rare consensual societies, factions and inequality under the law persisted—whether the plebs and populares of early Republican Rome, the greens and blues of Justinian’s Constantinople, or the Guelphs and Ghibellines of thirteenth-century Florence. Belonging to the wrong ethnic group or religion or political clique translated into a diminished political existence—or often far worse. Institutionalized persecution required the use of mass violence, in the way that governments today have systematically oppressed Chinese Uyghurs and Tibetans, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, or Serbian Bosnians. https://victorhanson.com/what-made-us-go-crazy-part-two/

‘Science,’ They Said Science is dying; superstition disguised as morality is returning. And we all will soon become poorer, angrier and more divided. The scientific method used to govern much of popular American thinking. In empirical fashion scientists advised us to examine evidence and data, and then by induction come to rational hypotheses. The enemies of “science” were politics, superstition, bias, and deduction. Yet we are now returning to our version of medieval alchemy and astrology in rejecting a millennium of the scientific method. Take the superstitions that now surround COVID-19. We now know from data that a prior case...

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Joe Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country. In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 service members, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be...

Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Victor Davis Hanson joined Fox News to rip the Federal Reserve for being more concerned with targeting gender pronouns than dangerous inflation. Fox News host Tucker Carlson said during the June 10 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight that he obtained a Federal Reserve memo instructing employees to dispense with “offensive” words and phrases. Carlson said these words included: “‘Founding Fathers,’ ‘man-made,’ and singular pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘her.’” Hanson was not having any of it. Hanson explained that the Federal Reserve being woke was “characteristic of all bureaucracies, that when they can’t solve an existential problem,...

For nearly two years, Americans have engaged in a great woke experiment of cannibalizing themselves. American civilization has invested massive labor, capital and time in an effort to constantly flagellate itself for not being perfect. Yet America's resilience and its resources are not infinite. We are now beginning to see the consequences of what happens when premodern tribalism absorbs Americans. There are repercussions when ideology governs policy or when we take for granted the basics of life to pursue its trappings. Who cares whether the blow-dried media is woke if it cannot report the truth and keep politicians honest? Once...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs. Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities. Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States — despite its powerful diversity training programs. Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon and politically weaponized intelligence communities. Why not, when President Joe Biden trashes both American frackers and the Saudis...

The American-nurtured Afghan military of the last 20 years that had suffered thousands of prior casualties evaporated in a few hours in the encirclement of Kabul. Enlistees apparently calculated that their own meager chances with the premodern Taliban were still better than fighting as a dependency of the postmodern United States—despite its deterrent embassy pride flags, powerful diversity training programs, and indomitable new Afghan University gender studies majors. Forces more powerful than the Taliban, in places far more strategic, will now leverage a cognitively challenged American president, an ideologically driven but predictably incompetent administration, a woke Pentagon, and politically weaponized...

<p>Institutions are being absorbed not just by the woke apparat, but by an array of ideologies that seeks to destroy them.</p><p>The collective madness that ensued from the pandemic, the quarantine, the self-induced recession, the George Floyd killing and subsequent months of exempted riots, the election year, and the resurgence of variants of the Chinese-engineered coronavirus, all ignited the fuse of formerly inert socialist dynamite. And the ensuing explosion of revolutionary fervor in just a few months has made America almost unrecognizable.</p>

Nations have often gone mad in a matter of months. The French abandoned their supposedly idealistic revolutionary project and turned it into a monstrous hell for a year between July 1793 and 1794. After the election of November 1860, in a matter of weeks, Americans went from thinking secession was taboo to visions of killing the greatest number of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Mao’s China went from a failed communist state to the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, when he unleashed the Cultural Revolution in 1966. In the last six months, we have seen...

In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.